mrgordon

I believe the other poster is saying that by sending a work email from your laptop or probably even by connecting to the company servers through it, your device could be theoretically investigated as part of a lawsuit. If you don’t use it for email and just type SSH on it then admittedly they probably won’t have much to find, but they could still get access.

Don’t you see some major risks in choosing a Facebook product as your main messaging app?

Yes I was delighted to learn in Switzerland that before my flight out I could take my suitcases to any train station in the country and they would route them to the airport for me and make sure they made it on the plane. It’s some truly incredible infrastructure!

People can only walk so far especially if the weather is bad, they are older, etc. The point is if I have to walk past multiple gas stations and a car service center with broken down cars and fumes then it’s not a nice place to walk. I have lived next to a car service center before and even though it was tiny it was a constant blight on the neighborhood.

Not to mention almost all the grocery stores in San Rafael are east of the highway while the Google-labeled walkable areas are west of the highway. So in practice people probably don’t walk to the grocery store on a regular basis unless they go to the Safeway. You may have a different view but Safeway is a terrible grocery store by Bay Area standards so it’d be a real shame for that to be your only realistic option without resorting to bus rides.

Bus transit is less reliable than metro for a number of reasons, most notably getting stuck in traffic. It’s fine if it works for your particular usage pattern but a bus that runs once an hour and doesn’t have an exact arrival time isn’t the most convenient. I’d much rather have a metro that comes every couple minutes like almost every major city in Europe and Asia.

You seem to hate BART but I’m not really sure why and why you believe the cities outside the North Bay are full of lawbreakers. San Mateo has a higher household income and SF is tied with Marin. Marin is just full of more NIMBYs. It’s not like their shit doesn’t smell just because they live in a less populated county.

As for why I focus on public transit, it’s because you can only walk so far before you need another mode of transit. If you don’t find a convenient one, then most likely you’ll take a car. If people take cars a lot, then the city will be designed to support those cars which makes it harder to walk. Then fewer people can reasonably walk to all their needs so even more people buy cars creating induced demand as the highways and roads constantly need to be widened over the decades.

Maybe you’re happy with a tiny little downtown like those in most of the Marin cities but for most people from a major city they would be bored with what they could easily explore on foot in one of those towns in probably a few weeks. Without a way to connect to other cities, you’re basically just trapped in a tiny little area without resorting to once an hour bus service and cars.

Portland is a pretty unique place. They famously drew a circle around the city and said development can’t go outside of that area which forced a certain density and allowed transit to be planned well in advance.

I didn’t spent a ton of time there and admittedly it was January so it was quite frigid, but the distances can still feel quite long between things outside of downtown. Portland made a few mistakes when they embraced car culture including getting rid of their street cars like many American cities. They also annexed a lot of less walkable areas around the city. There is no subway and the light rail seems well run but it doesn’t exactly cover the whole city. My sense is that most people who want to walk will end up biking or taking some form of transit in many neighborhoods because of the distances between things. In the winter it was quite hard to find lively streets and public squares to be quite honest. I suspect it’s because it’s easier to just drive when it’s cold, things are a bit far, etc.

Marin is lovely but most of it is extremely spread out. There are a few towns like you mentioned that one could conceivably get by without a car but it’s not easy. Looking at San Rafael, Google Maps shows 4th street is a walking area (denoted in beige) and a very small area a few blocks south near the Safeway around 1st and 2nd streets but it isn’t a very big area. Usually a giant chain supermarket is a pretty clear sign that things were designed for cars and not for pedestrians who would typically be better served by neighborhood markets and small shops near their house to grab some essentials. Zooming in near the walkable areas of San Rafael, Google Maps instantly highlights many car oriented businesses like at 2nd street and D street where we see a Chevron gas station, an Arco gas station, and an O’Reilly Auto Parts store all on one corner. I don’t know about you but even if it’s technically walkable that’s not what I want to walk through every day when I go outside especially if I need to walk past it to get to the train to commute to work, etc. A major highway cuts through the east side of the city which also limits expansion of pleasant walking areas and litters the area with on-ramps and other car-centric design.

Marin county famously blocked BART from expanding north in order to keep out the “riff-raff”. These sorts of decisions had major consequences and while you can find a few blocks here and there that are walkable, the county as a whole is largely long drives through tree covered asphalt in order to get between areas.

If you’re happy with a few blocks of downtown then admittedly some of the towns probably meet your needs but it’s not exactly designed for most people to live a car-free live. Even the Bank of America ATM there proudly shows on Google that it’s a drive-through ATM which I’ve never seen once in Europe (or San Francisco for that matter)

In your examples for the Olympics, the name is the very last column. So I would need to scan through Rank, Gold Medals, Silver Medals, Bronze Medals, and Total Medals to find the name that the Rank belongs with. Compare this to Rank and Silver Medals which have nothing to do with each other. You can be rank 1 with 0 silver medals. If sorting by Total Medals you could have 0 gold medals and be in rank 1. So the rank belongs with the name. The most basic question everyone answers with the table is “which country is in first?”. Some people may wonder “how many silver medals did the first place country get?” and obviously the point of a table is to allow them to find this information too, but it’s of much lower interest to most readers. For example, you’d never find a table that just showed Rank and Silver Medals (or even Rank and Gold Medals) but it’s common to see a table that only shows Rank and Country or in the case of golf Rank and Player Name. Who won the Masters? It wasn’t the score that won, it was the player

Well of course this is what I prefer. But the other poster was saying they didn’t see why cities can’t be designed for cars AND for pedestrians. My point is that the policies put in place in almost all American cities for cars (mandatory parking requirements in new buildings, lots of street parking or parking lots, mandatory setbacks from the street for buildings, highway entrances, etc.) work directly against making a city dense enough to be able to easily walk to enough things that you don’t end up resorting to cars.

The thing you’re missing is that I spent much less than $100 a month in transit costs when I lived in SF. When you have a car there, you will spend probably $500-$1000 on the car, the insurance, the gas, parking meters, etc. Then you will likely need to pay for a parking spot. In the Mission the going rate before COVID was about $400+ a month. My friends who had cars and didn’t have dedicated parking would also get $75 parking or street cleaning tickets fairly often.

So I literally could take a $5 ride each way every time I didn’t feel like walking and I had a huge cost savings, much less hassle with parking and street cleaning at 6 AM, less environmental impact, no problems drinking and driving, etc. After a while, most people without dedicated parking end up leaving their car in the same spot as long as possible and mostly use it for weekend trips outside the city.

Yes being flat does help for sure. In much of Europe I think they solve this problem with trains or sometimes buses to get to the parks or outlying areas. For example, much of Italy is hill towns and no one wants to walk up huge hills to get to each town but you can typically get there with transit.

The United States admittedly is quite large and spread out but if we started to connect more things with transit then I think it would stop feeling so much this way. Like why couldn’t there be a connection from San Francisco to Tahoe that doesn’t involve driving? It’s a very very popular weekend trip and a train would be great for moving skis and other equipment.

If you live near Seattle, you’re lucky to have some of the better planning in the United States and some of the more open-minded people with regards to transit, camping, etc. In a place like Florida, for example, it is fairly common to meet people who’ve never been camping unless maybe you count a music festival. The priority is often air conditioning, a nice hotel room towering over the beach, etc. which is not what the Dutch seek out for the most part

Where is that? You may have a different idea of walkable than the other poster. As soon as you have tons of parking spaces, mandatory setbacks, etc. you’ve taken much of the room away from pedestrians forcing them to walk much longer distances (often in bad weather) to get to where they want to go. That’s why the two are at such odds.

In Europe this is solved by having a train station in the center. Even the little towns have them which is why it can be lovely to spend a day exploring the area whereas in the United States it’s often easier to assume a small town will have little walkability and maybe you’ll just stop there for gas.

Most Americans would say the Netherlands is tough for driving I think because the cars are smaller, the lanes are smaller, there is light rail everywhere, many pedestrians and bikers everywhere, etc.

I think all these decisions are why the Netherlands are so lovely and most of America is seemingly highways, strip malls, and suburbs.

One of the most popular Dutch vacations is biking around the country and camping instead of staying at hotels. It’s quite far from American car culture in that regard.

Lyft Line and Uber Pool were usually $4-5 around San Francisco before COVID and you can use electric bikes through the bike share for $15 for the entire month. Obviously it’s easier if you live near the walkable area, but it doesn’t need to be as expensive as you claim and SF is one of the more expensive cities.

The rank goes with the label. Who got first? Tiger Woods got first. It isn't helpful to know that someone shot a 68 and got first without knowing who it is.

The ones I checked have rank and player name first followed by the detailed scores

https://www.espn.com/golf/leaderboard

The rank being on the left is like a row index. It helps you count without needing to count from the beginning of the column. For this reason, many data-oriented languages like R don’t even consider the row index to be part of the data.

If anything the ranking reinforces the idea that a given country is in a given position which is the overall structure and intent of the data (in my view). I’m not likely to look at the table to extract the fact that “7 gold medals is 17th place.” I’m going to see that “country X is 17th place.”

FYI you’re pulling out of date data it looks like

https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/tokyo-2020-summer-olympic...

The US got a lot of recent medals which increases the lead

Don’t you think the most important column may not be the one you sort by? Most data will have an ID or label (country name in this case) that differentiates the row and gives it meaning. Putting this column last obscures the meaning of the rows.

Surely the US pulls ahead as currently they have a large lead in total medals and are not too far behind in gold

Yes most readers know to look for a triangle icon or something similar to indicate which column is currently the sort column if there are multiple options. Changing all the column orderings does feel heavy handed. It’s like if spreadsheets always had to sort by column A, then column B, etc.

It’s an interesting point and I somewhat agree but I think the example takes it too far. The most important information is not the sort column but rather the country name. If I want to see who is leading, I don’t want to scan to the final column on the page to see the country names. In fact, if I just want to see which country is leading (and I don’t strongly care about the sort order chosen) then I might only look at the country names and ignore the detailed counts entirely. Whereas if I only see the total medal count or gold medal count column, then I basically have no information since I still need to scan to the last column to find the country names they are associated with.

Signed in just to say YES! You get it. Flowdock is by far the best thread implementation ever.

You’re totally right. And then the entire city is built for giant SUVs when it should be built for people to walk

You missed the point. The other person was saying that now Uber and Lyft are more regulated so they have little advantage over taxis now.

Thanks for the thoughtful response.

Unfortunately many people call out Obama specifically as a way to take a partisan political jab at the left especially on forums. Trump’s White House was full of crooks who really were there based 100% on who they knew since many were otherwise unqualified. It makes going back a president feel like cherry picking an example but I see you could have done it as Biden would draw from Obama’s sphere more.

I am not aware of the specific Dimon speech you mentioned. Ajit Pai had a close relationship with the ISPs and Telecommunications companies with all their attacks on net neutrality etc. so I do find that the argument that Democrats are so much cozier with tech to be a bit oversimplified.

I agree with your comment overall, just shedding some insights on my thinking

I like StreetSmartEdge better but I would say ThinkOrSwim is much better on mobile especially for options. Real time quotes go a long way and the options are displayed in a condensed fashion.

In the extreme case people will set up a paper wallet using a computer that’s disconnected from the internet. Once they have the keys, they can typically keep them non-digitally and transfer coins to that address as safe cold storage

You’re ignoring that the companies can just keep lots of cash without distributing it to individuals in order to avoid taxation under your system. So for example the company can rent houses, cars, and airplanes for every employee to ensure there is not much money left to be taxed as income. On paper they look like corporate expenses but it’s really just a way to distribute money without it being taxable.

The number of GPUs being produced may be constant but it’s lower than desired. The issue is Nvidia worked with Samsung to fab their chips this time around and Samsung had poor yields. Nvidia should have used TSMC like AMD and Apple but they tried to use Samsung and got burned on supply. They said they will use TSMC going forward but in the meantime there are shortages.

I’m not sure it curtails it rather than just generating new card types that can only mine coins and then are garbage